Panic at the Disco’s Brendon Urie shreds Trump campaign for playing 'High Hopes'

Panic at the Disco frontman Brendon Urie shredded the Trump campaign late Tuesday after the president walked out to the band’s song “High Hopes” at his rally in Phoenix.

“Dear Trump campaign,” the singer wrote on Twitter. “F— you. You’re not invited. Stop playing my song. No thanks, Brendon Urie, Panic! At The Disco & company.”

In a follow-up tweet, Urie wrote that Trump “represents nothing we stand for.”

“The highest hope we have is voting this monster out in November. Please do your part,” he added, including a link to HeadCount, a nonpartisan organization whose mission is to use “the power of music to register voters and promote participation in democracy.

Urie has made no bones about his low opinion of the president, telling Kerrang two years ago that Trump is “a f—ing asshole” who is “encroaching on people’s rights.”

He joins Tom Petty’s family, which called out the campaign for using the singer’s 1989 hit “I Won’t Back Down” at the sparsely attended rally in Oklahoma Saturday. In a statement that was accompanied by a cease-and-desist notice to the campaign, they said, “Trump was in no way authorized to use this song to further a campaign that leaves too many Americans and common sense behind. Both the late Tom Petty and his family firmly stand against racism and discrimination of any kind. Tom Petty would never want a song of his used for a campaign of hate. He liked to bring people together. We believe in America and we believe in democracy. But Donald Trump is not representing the noble ideals of either,” the statement reads. “We would hate for fans that are marginalized by this administration to think we were complicit in this usage.”

But this same scenario has occurred multiple times since Trump announced his candidacy in 2015. Adele, Neil Young, the Rolling Stones, Aerosmith’s Steven Tyler, Rihanna and Elton John have either distanced themselves from Trump’s campaign or threatened legal action. However, the issue is complicated by performing rights organizations’ fair-use provisions, and the Trump campaign seems unperturbed by playing music from artists who oppose the president, as it has frequently continued to use songs by those artists — although we’ll see if Urie’s choice of words changes that situation.

Jem Aswad

June 24, 2020, 10:10 AM EDT

Click here to read the full article.

Panic at the Disco frontman Brendon Urie shredded the Trump campaign late Tuesday after the president walked out to the band’s song “High Hopes” at his rally in Phoenix.

“Dear Trump campaign,” the singer wrote on Twitter. “F— you. You’re not invited. Stop playing my song. No thanks, Brendon Urie, Panic! At The Disco & company.”

Click here to read the full article.

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